Skip to main content

EAMS 2018 Take Aways from Day 2

EAMS Day 2

Day 2 of EAMS had a LOT of speakers (of which I was one). I couldn't possibly hope to do justice to all the interesting and varied content presented so I'll just pick out a few things that caught my eye and made me think "hmmm....what if I tried that out with .....".

The day started out with a Keynote from Paul Milner from nationalnumeracy.org.uk entitled "Maths outside the Classroom".  Paul introduced us to some scary statistics about the lack of Numeracy among adults (in the uk, but have no reason to believe the story would be much different in Ireland). These poor levels of Numeracy in the working adult population are costing the UK economy approximately 1.3% of GDP. He made a great point that even if we somehow got the current education system 'perfect' it would take 50 years for this to address the adult numeracy problems. We were shown a diagram from the National Numeracy website showing the three key attitudes that an adult learner needs to have to succeed in improving their numeracy.
It's not surprising that the National Numeracy website has a self assessment Numeracy test but what is really interesting is that they also have an attitudinal assessment to assess these three core attitudes.

In the afternoon session I gave my own talk about the Transitioning to e-Assessment in Mathematics Education (TEAME) project. If anyone would like to know more about that why not have a look at teame.ie. 

Late in the afternoon David Rickard spoke about Paper-Based e-assessment. The context of David's teaching would be very similar to my own so I could immediately see the relevance of his talk to my practice. I'd never heard of the Auto-Multiple-Choice software before and it piqued my interest. You can use it to create paper based MCQs that can be automatically marked by scanning in. I can certainly see how used in conjunction with Mal-rules, as discussed by Martin Greenhow, and topic interleaving you one could create really nice homeworks/in class practice.

I missed out on the evening workshops and the conference dinner along with the sprints on day three. If anyone out there would like to contribute a guest post on these I'd be delighted...

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visibly Random Groupings

About six months ago I was browsing on twitter when I came across some Maths education people tweeting about #VRG, #VNPS and #thinkingclassroom. This led me down a wonderful rabbit hole of figuring out what these mysterious acronyms stood for. In today’s blog post I’m going to focus on #VRG which, I discovered, stands for Visibly Random Groups. Visibly Random groups is an idea put forward by Peter Liljedahl.  Usually when it comes to carrying out some group work in the classroom there are two standard ways that the groups are formed. Either the students themselves pick the groups or the teacher picks the groups. When the teacher picks the groups, there is usually some underlying reason that the groups are assigned in this way. Perhaps the teacher wants to make sure that there is one strong student in each group. Or maybe the teacher wants to split up some students who tend to be chatty. When the students pick the groups they will tend to pick groups with their friends. In v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Domino Logic Gates. Fun and hands-on.

Domino logic Gates: A hands on lesson on boolean logic One of my favourite classes this year was one where we built domino Logic gates. We were seven weeks into a first year maths course for computer science students. We had been working through sets  then algebra and then Boolean Algebra. Each week we had one three hour lecture (horrific, right). In the seventh week there was the first in class test for the module and I knew that the students were going to be tired after doing the test and I needed to keep it "light" somehow for the remainder of the three hour period. I was also working with these same students in a module called Effective Learning and Development and from discussion in that module I knew that a few of the learners were the type of learner that liked to move and do hands on work (there was a time that I would have said they were learners with a kinesthetic learning style but I know that is all out of vogue at the moment). I had been thinking of ways to t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Numbas Question using Eukleides

Experimenting with using the new Eukleides extension in Numbas v4.0 A few weeks ago I attended an advanced numbas workshop given by Christian Lawson-Perfect in Cork Institute of Technology. During the workshop Christian introduced us to some of the newest features of Numbas that might be useful for us. Two things that immediately struck me as useful were the Eukleides extension and also the ability to embed a Numbas question into a blog. So here I am three weeks later finally getting around to trying both of those things out. A couple of years ago myself and Julie were both working on the teame.ie project which involved a lot of thinking about Numbas questions and trying to create nice exams and questions to help students with their learning via scaffolded tests and formative feedback.  We had difficulty getting the trigonometry questions to look nice and I'm not sure that our way of making the diagrams variable was ideal. So I decided to revisit one of those questions and r...
Post a Comment
Read more